Re:Stuff I've Messed Up While Interviewing
by kethinov on Wednesday March 04, 2015 @12:26PM
(#9145799)
Every detail you just described exactly mirrors my experience. The VP of engineering, the math puzzle I hadn't seen before, trying to solve it in a Google doc rather than with code I could compile. All of it.
I did end up solving it, but I wasn't happy with the solution and neither was he, with good reason of course, but it was one of those problems I easily could have solved if given the proper time to work on it rather than digitally whiteboarding it for 20 minutes in a high pressure situation. A quick and dirty solution is all you should expect from working on a never before seen problem in 20 minutes on paper without a compiler.
I came away feeling as though their process was more broken than my performance. Doubtless, I could have done better. But it just felt so strange to be washed out after four other engineers thought I was qualified.
The high pressure situation makes things hard. In a recent interview, I turned
P(A and B and C) = P(A) + P(B|A) + P(C|AB)
I did OK, but only OK on it. His comment when we ran short of time was "Yeah, I think with a little debugging, that solution would probably work" but then he passed.
Perhaps it's just my bruised ego, but I think he made a bad decision. Here he is with 5 members of his own team saying that I'd be a great fit, but he basically selects for people who have encountered a puzzle with very little relation to the actual work involved in the role. He may as well have evaluated me as a developer on my ability to prepare a chocolate souffle in 30 minutes. It would have been roughly as representative of my skill set.